Insight into how grid technology performs can be tough to get quickly! Result — like cost and energy savings, peak shaving, ramping requirements and fossil fuel usage — depend heavily on the usage, energy mix, geography and consumer behavior. The Grid Project Impact Quantification (GridPIQ) tool from the U.S. Department of Energy and Pacific Northwest National Laboratories allows you to quickly analyze and visualize your grid project from multiple perspectives.

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Building America Program has been a source of innovations in residential building energy performance, durability, quality, affordability, and comfort for 20 years. This world-class research program partners with industry (including many of the top U.S. home builders) to bring cutting-edge innovations and resources to market.

Learn about how this world-class research program can help the U.S. building industry promote and construct homes that are better for business, homeowners, and the nation. Continued below.

For example, the Solution Center provides expert building science information for building professionals looking to gain a competitive advantage by delivering high performance homes. At Building America meetings, researchers and industry partners can gather to generate new ideas for improving energy efficiency of homes. And, Building America research teams and DOE national laboratories offer the building industry specialized expertise and new insights from the latest research projects.

The Building America Program conducts applied research, development, and deployment in residential buildings. Building America projects are led by U.S. Department of Energy national laboratories and expert building science teams in partnership with leading industry players (e.g., builders, contractors, and manufacturers).

Join Orange ButtonSM and the industry leaders who will drive down solar costs. The Orange ButtonSM initiative has launched! As part of the U.S. Department of Energy SunShot initiative, Orange Button supports the creation and adoption of industry-led open data standards for rapid and seamless data exchange across the solar value chain from origination to decommissioning.

Please join this public webinar as Orange Button leaders provide an overview and details about the goals and objectives of the 24 month program.

KEY TAKEAWAYS:
Learn about Orange Button and how to make it work for you
Meet the Orange Button Team
Learn about Orange Button Strategy and Business Requirements Working Groups including: Deployment, Financial, Real Estate, Solar O&M, and Grid Integration.
Learn about Orange Button next steps and how to register for the Orange Button Working Groups.

IoT-Enabled Smart City Framework: U.S. Kick-off Held on March 24-25, 2016: The international technical public working group to help develop an IoT-Enabled Smart City Framework (IES-City Framework) was launched March 24-25 at a kick-off event on the NIST campus in Gaithersburg, Maryland. The U.S. event, held immediately following the GCTC Tech Jam, drew 70 participants. A parallel European kick-off event is planned for April 14-15, 2016, in Rome, Italy.

Describing the purpose and importance of the IES-City Framework, Dr. Martin Burns, NIST lead for this project, said, “Many organizations are currently developing platforms, architectures, and standards for Internet of Things (IoT) and smart city applications. With dozens of unconnected standardization and specification activities competing for attention and market share throughout the world, the likelihood of easy integration of new features from other parties may be impractical due to incompatible technologies and the large technical distance to integration.”

Burns continued, “Our framework effort comes at a key time. We expect to ‘discover’ pivotal points of interoperability (PPIs)—common technical choices addressing stakeholder concerns—which we believe exist but cannot easily be discerned. We won’t be picking winners and losers. Rather, we’ll identify the PPIs that will help the full spectrum of standards and deployment activities to cooperate and harmonize their efforts, thus reducing the technical distance to integration and therefore supporting composable smart cities.”

The first day of the kick-off event featured seven one-hour technical presentations by various organizations, detailing their current IoT and smart city technologies and plans. These presentations were webcast, and a link to the video archive is available online.

During the second day, the participants met in breakout sessions that introduced and organized the three subgroups that will be working on the first stage of the framework process:

Application Framework Subgroup—an activity designed to enumerate the scope of smart city applications and define metrics for the readiness of cities and municipalities to absorb these applications
Consensus PPI Subgroup—focused on the technical analysis of smart city and IoT technologies to discover PPIs across stakeholder concerns
Deployed PPI Subgroup—performing case studies of extensive smart city applications where multiple domains are integrated, such as emergency response and transportation systems, or where multiple smart city technologies have been integrated, in order to discover the PPIs that enabled these integrations
More details about each subgroup, including information on how to participate, is available online on the IES-City Framework’s collaboration website.

The format of the April 14-15 event in Rome will be similar to the U.S. event, with additional one-hour presentations of different technologies, followed by a half-day of subgroup meetings. (Registration details for the Rome event are available online.)

Working in parallel for the next few months—meeting online in regularly scheduled webinars—the three subgroups will prepare working drafts related to their specific focus. During the summer months, the three drafts will be combined, integrated, and refined. According to Burns, the aggressive goal is to release for comment a first draft of the framework document in the fall.

Participation in the subgroups and framework activity is open to anyone. NIST has set up a collaboration website for the project and a briefing paper providing more information on the project. An email list has been established for interested parties to join to be informed and discuss the project. Project contact: Dr. Martin J. Burns

Take advantage of Honeywell’s Automated Demand Response (Auto DR) that provides a custom automated solution for commercial and industrial facilities. Limit energy use and ease rate spikes during peak events. When energy demand exceeds supply you need a reliable and efficient energy management system while enabling you to meet business and production needs. Auto DR is part of our Smart Grid Solutions

Cucamonga Valley Water District Case Study: The District’s participation in an automated demand response program mitigates peak demand charges, providing savings to help offset costs while ensuring water quality. Cucamonga Valley Water District Case Study

Members, I am pleased to announce that SGIP won the NIST Funding opportunity which we submitted via a competitive bidding process in June. I have been working through the final details with our NIST contracting specialist. We will receive $2.1M when it is all finalized over the course of the next three years; which will breakdown as follows: $900k for 2016, $700k for 2017, and $500k for 2018. We look forward to continuing our relationship with NIST.

I am also pleased to announce that SGIP was selected for the DoE Funding Opportunity that we also bid in June, called “Solar Bankability.” We are currently in the process of negotiating this award which is for $1.5M over two years. SGIP bid with two subcontractors (NREL and SEIA) and the negotiation process is active and not yet finalized.

Last but not least, I want to thank all of you who attended and supported our Annual Conference in New Orleans. We have already received two new SGIP members from the event. Welcome! I also want to express my warm thanks for the various emails received in since the event. Kudos to all who stayed for the very last meetings on the last day from 4 pm-5 pm on Thursday… the Grid 3.0 and the EnergyIoT™ & Open Field Message Bus™ committees. The OpenFMB™ group had over 45 in attendance. I sat in on the DRGS subcommittee on Thursday and also noticed a number of new folks in attendance.

Consider the Cost of a Power Outage: “The U.S. Energy Information Administration estimates that the $150 billion in annual economic losses because of outages is equivalent to adding 4 cents per kWh of costs to consumers nationwide.” — Annual Energy Outlook 2010, U.S. Department of Energy

February 23, 2015: What is it really like to deploy an advanced distribution management system (ADMS)? In February 2014 the Department of Energy’s Office of Electricity Delivery and Energy Reliability formed the ADMS Working Group to collect the experiences, insights, and lessons learned from utilities implementing ADMS. The discussions from the Working Group are captured in a guide called Voices of Experience|Insights Into Advanced Distribution Management Systems.

Excerpt from the Guide: “Considering that this is an era in which smart phones and Google Maps are ubiquitous, it may come as a surprise that utilities have very little visibility into their distribution systems. Most systems still rely on breakers to disconnect the lines in the event of a fault, customers to call in to report an outage, and line crews to find the effected circuit and restore power. However, this may be changing.

Utilities that have deployed smart grid technologies have learned lessons and gained insights along the way—sometimes the hard way—that can be applied to new projects as well as existing projects that may be expanding or are presenting challenges. The hope is that sharing this information will help other utilities overcome or avoid some of the challenges these first adopters identified and be able to deploy their own ADMS successfully and efficiently.

ADMS Working Group Guide Summary: (Note:This report was prepared for the U.S. Department of Energy by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory under contract No. DE-AC36-08G028308.)

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009 spurred investments in smart grid technology and programs at utilities across the country. The Smart Grid Investment Grant program and Smart Grid Demonstration projects that it funded provided unprecedented opportunities to learn from smart grid implementation.

In 2011, the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Electricity Delivery and Energy Reliability (DOE OE), in partnership with electric utilities that received ARRA funds, convened a series of Regional Smart Grid Peer-to-Peer Workshops. These were designed to bring together utilities to engage in dialogues about the most compelling smart grid topics in each region. The meetings offered a platform for smart grid implementers at all stages of project deployment to share their experiences and learn from each other.

Realizing the benefits of bringing utilities together to share their experiences, in February 2014 DOE OE formed the ADMS Working Group by assembling a leadership team of representatives from the utility industry with the mission to collect the experiences, insights, and lessons learned from implementing these systems. This guide is the result of a one-day meeting held at CenterPoint Energy in Houston, Texas, in May 2014 that was followed by a series of conference calls about specific aspects of ADMS, interviews with individuals leading ADMS projects at their utilities, and a final small group meeting at San Diego Gas & Electric in California in October 2014. The information in this guide came directly from the people in the industry on the leading edge of transforming their distribution systems.

Although the working group included more than 40 people and represented 30 utilities and organizations, the following were key contributors of their experience:

We hope that sharing this information will help other utilities overcome or avoid some of the challenges these first adopters identified and be able to deploy their own ADMS successfully and efficiently.

January 12, 2015: President Obama announced the release of the final concepts and principles for a Voluntary Code of Conduct (VCC) related to privacy of customer energy usage data for utilities and third parties. The final VCC is the result of a 22-month multi-stakeholder effort which was facilitated by the Energy Department’s Office of Electricity Delivery and Energy Reliability in coordination with the Federal Smart Grid Task Force. The VCC reflects input from stakeholders across the electricity industry and incorporates comments and responses from the public that were collected via DOE’s Federal Register Notice issued earlier this year. The VCC will be instrumental in providing mechanism for demonstrating how consumers’ data is protected and secured thus instilling consumer confidence.

January 6, 2015: Thirty nine utilities met October 27-29, 2014, in Charlotte, North Carolina, to share results and lessons learned resulting from smart grid deployments supported through funds provided by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI). This report provides a summary of the conference – the Smart Grid Experience: Applying Results, Reaching Beyond.

This summary describes each session and provides links to the presentations and project descriptions. In the final session, utility representatives shared their views on project successes, challenges, insights, and next steps.

December, 2014″ Six utilities that participated in DOE’s cost-shared Smart Grid Investment Grant (SGIG) program deployed in-home and public electric vehicle charging stations and evaluated customer charging behaviors and impacts on the grid. There are relatively few plug-in electric vehicles on the road today, and as a result the six SGIG projects focused on establishing the charging infrastructure with a relatively low number of stations and evaluated a small number of participating vehicles. As expected, project results showed negligible grid impacts from small-scale electric vehicle charging today, but gave utilities important insights into the demand growth and peak-period charging habits they can anticipate if electric vehicle adoption rises as expected over the next decade.

Charging Behaviors: i. The vast majority of in-home charging participants charged their vehicles overnight during off-peak periods. Where offered, time-based rates were successful in encouraging greater off-peak charging. ii. Public charging station usage was low, but primarily took place during business hours and thus increased the overlap with typical peak periods. Plug-in hybrid owners frequently used the (often free) public stations for short charging sessions to “top off their tanks.”

Grid Impacts: iii. The length of charging sessions and the power required varies based on the vehicle model, charger type, and state of battery discharge. iv. The average power demand to charge most vehicles was 3-6 kilowatts, which is roughly equivalent to powering a small, residential air conditioning unit. v. However, depending on the model, the load from one electric vehicle model can be as much as 19 kilowatts, which is more than the load for most large, single-family homes.

Technology Issues: vi. Faster chargers may require more expertise to install in homes and public stations. Installing a 240-volt charging station, which typically charges 3-5 times as fast as a charger using a standard 120-volt outlet, requires a licensed electrician and occasionally service upgrades. vii. Public charging station installation had high costs and required substantial coordination with equipment vendors, installers, and host organizations to address construction, safety, and code requirements. viii. Low usage at public charging stations will require longer capital cost recovery without substantial growth in usage. ix. Some utilities found residential interoperability problems in communication between smart meters and charging stations. SMUD found that the two devices only connected successfully about 50% of the time during load reduction events.

Advanced Metering Infrastructure: ($1,997,812,053 or 43% Federal Share) Advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) is a system of smart meters, two-way communications networks, and data management systems implemented to enable metering and other information exchange between utilities and their customers. In addition, a subset of SGIG projects are conducting statistically rigorous studies of consumer behavior and demand response. These projects include applications of AMI, time-based rate programs, and enabling technologies such as Web portals, in-home displays, and programmable communicating thermostats. They also include the use of randomized and controlled experimental designs with treatment and control groups. This effort presents an opportunity to advance the electric power industry’s understanding of consumer behavior through highly rigorous statistical methods.